Sunday, July 19, 2015

Rogue Wave

Rogue Wave is a very weird game indeed. I didn't know what the heck I was making for about 90% of the time I spent on this game. I started with a concept that I knew could work, but I had no idea if it would. Very much an experiment for me.

The game came to me pretty much out of the blue: What if you had turrets, in a sort of tower defense type game, and those turrets had to hit each other to set off a chain reaction? It'd be really powerful to set off a million turrets at once, but you'd have to make sure that they were pointed at the enemy in addition to each other.

Rogue Wave didn't look like it'd be any fun all the way up until I finished it. I'm still not sure if I'd call it really fun, but it's at least interesting (going back to that idea that a designer can make the mistake of accidentally creating an interesting game as opposed to a fun game).

I do think that a much bigger game could get created out of Rogue Wave... I think there's a lot of design space to investigate here. The main parameters you have to tweak are large enough, I think:

Enemy size

Enemy speed

Enemy spawn rate

Difficulty increase rate

Enemy size/speed/spawn rate changes over time

Turret fire rate

Turret turn rate

Turret Size

Turret # of sides (an octagonal turret could spit out 8 bullets)

Energy generation rate and requirements

Bullet Size

Bullet Speed

My original idea for the game allowed the player to go to each turret and use energy to totally customize the size and #of sides for each turret. If you had a double-large turret, it shot out two bullets per side, and if you had a triple-large octagonal turret, you'd have a huge turret that shot out three bullets for each of its eight sides! I knew before I sat down to begin development that this was out of scope.

The menu music is from SonarTuning and is used under this license. (I've been finding more and more music under the public domain. The in-game music is a track called Observing the Star. It's really kind of lovely and I wish I could remember who made it!)